At Gamescom 2024 in Cologne, Nvidia has today showcased what it sees as the future of gaming. It provided the first showcase demo of Nvidia ACE-powered digital human technologies using the upcoming mecha game Mecha BREAK.
While use use of AI image generators like Adobe Firefly and Flux has exploded for the creation of 2D images, Nvidia ACE uses generative AI to allow players to interact with in-game characters. The showcase at Gamescom allows players to engage in conversational interactions in Mecha BREAK using a technology that Nvidia thinks will provide a more immersive gaming experience.
We've already had a taste of some of Nvidia ACE's capabilities ourselves, but this is Nvidia's first showcase of ACE-powered game interactions within a game. Developed by Amazing Seasun Games, the upcoming Mecha BREAK is a multiplayer game that allows players to choose from diverse mechs, customise appearances and battle war machines. The game will have real human voice-acted characters at launch, but Nvidia used the game at Gamescom to showcase how ACE can allow players to interact with game characters using natural language.
Players can ask for advice on objectives, the ideal mech for a task and get their mech’s paint job updated for "maximum battlefield bling". Nvidia Audio2Face-3D NIM and Whisper, OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition model, provide facial animation and speech recognition running on device, while Elevenlabs powers the character voice through the cloud.
Nvidia ACE is a suite of AI-driven digital human technologies. It includes Nvidia's first digital human technology on-device small language model, Nemotron-4 4B Instruct, which is designed for role-playing, with retrieval-augmented generation and function-calling capabilities, allowing game characters to respond to gamers, more intuitively understand instructions and perform more accurate and relevant actions.
The game publisher and developer Perfect World Games is also making use of Nvidia ACE and digital human technology in Legends, now enhanced with AI-powered vision capabilities that allow characters to see gamers and identify people and objects in the real world through a computer’s camera.
Mecha BREAK will launch in 2025 with full DLSS 3 support on day one. Players can sign up for future playtests on the game’s Steam page.
Also at Gamescom, Nvidia has announced that 20 new games are adding DLSS and RTX technologies. Upcoming titles with ray-tracing, DLSS 3 and Reflex include Star Wars Outlaws, which will give GeForce RTX players more frames and low latency (see our Star Wars Outlaws hands-on review. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is launching with Ray Tracing, DLSS 3 and Reflex, and Dune: Awakening is launching with DLSS 3 and Reflex.
